1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed toward systems for auditing software licenses, and more particularly, to a system that interfaces with a user's device to measure the device hardware configuration and thereby generate a device identifier used to audit software on the device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, there are limited ways to audit software licenses. At the same time, software piracy continues to grow at an alarming rate, particularly in emerging economies. In response, software companies have focused primarily on making it more difficult for would-be pirates to install a given software application illegally, such as a single copy of the application on multiple machines. Still, software pirates have found ways to bypass such security measures and install unauthorized software copies on multiple machines. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an auditing service for reliable software license authentication and to provide software owners with a measure of how many copies of their software have been legitimately registered and/or how many copies are pirated versions.